I hear people talk about website landing pages & how important they are but I’m not real sure what they’re talking about. Help?

Yes, landing pages are certainly important but not necessarily on their own. First, though, let’s define what a landing page is not. It’s not your website’s homepage, and this is what confuses a fair number of people. The reason for this is probably because a landing page is discussed as the entry point to your website for new visitors, which is technically correct, but it gets taken out of context.

Let’s say that you’re into advertising for your website, which is hopefully why you’re reading this blog post. You set up an ad campaign on a few different platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Google Ads (formerly AdWords) & you want to be able to measure the effectiveness of your ad campaigns. How in the world are you going to be able to tell which campaign is doing in terms of its performance? You are, of course, using analytics, but when you have hundreds or thousands of visits to your site every day, how can you measure this at a glance? This is where the landing page comes in.

A landing page should be set up to minimize the rest of the normal website noise – no distractions to take away from the intended message. You’ve had the payoff on your ad by the visitor clicking over to your website, now you get to make your pitch. If your website header is a bit busy, you would remove most of those distractions on the landing page and make the page as clean as possible to focus on the message. Your page should make the pitch for whatever the ad is for – optimize the landing page for the specific campaign – and have one call to action, two at the most. You really want to minimize distractions & people generally don’t want to have to put a lot of effort into figuring out what the next step is when they visit your website because not a lot of website visitors like puzzle games.

You said that I could use a landing page to measure the effectiveness of my campaigns?

Indeed I did. Not all ad platforms provide what I feel is adequate tracking of their success & some of the trackers tend to be a bit buggy, we’ll call it. I’ve seen sales attributed to ad campaigns multiple times that we knew for a fact were direct referrals, where the customer was provided a link directly that they purchase, they didn’t get there from the ads, yet the sale was attributed to the ad campaign. The moral of the story is that ad tracker data should be taken with a grain or two of salt & perhaps a good whiskey.

ANYway, moving on to measuring your campaigns’ performance & how the landing page fits into that – you can look at your analytics & tell behavior flow & conversion rate based on the landing page. So if someone lands on yoursite.com/landing-page-one/ & buys something or signs up to a mailing list, etc. you can attribute that conversion to that page. If the only way to have that page’s link is from your ad campaign (hint) then you’re already halfway where you need to be for your attribution. You can go a step further & look at the referral source, where the traffic is coming from, for any given landing page.

Why would this be important?

Advertising tends to be one of the larger expenses for a lot of companies, so you’re going to want to see what you’re getting for the money you spend on your ads. If you set up your campaign on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, AdRoll, and Google Ads, let it run for a bit, then check your conversion rates on your super duper landing page that you made just for this campaign & see that your conversion rates look something like this:

Seriously, Pinterest?

Facebook sent 679 people to your page, 3% of which converted

Instagram sent 302 people to your page, 4% of which converted

Google Ads sent 176 people to your page, 1.3% of which converted

AdRoll sent 402 people to your page, 6% of which converted

Pinterest sent 900 people to your page, 0.2% of which converted

then you’re going to be thinking real hard about how much you need that Pinterest part & maybe the Google Ads part of your campaign. That could very well place greater funding in what’s giving you the best results or reduce your overall ad budget significantly. Had you not had analytics on your site & a landing page set up specifically for this campaign, though, you would have been flying blind, with no way to measure your results easily. And nobody like flying blind, do they?

Ads: I'm in! Now all I need to do is show my ads to more people!

Whoa, there, sparky! Before you start thinking that you can throw money at a problem to make it go away, think again. For this, the “problem” is needing more sales, leads, etc., which is why you’re running ads in the first place, right? But the solution definitely isn’t just to throw it up in front of the masses, nonononono.

What?? I thought that this was a numbers game, so the more people that see my ads, the better my odds of getting conversions – was I wrong?

No, not exactly, you’re pretty well right on. Sort of. Picture this, if you will – your business is one where you sell something that a LOT of people use. Like logos … yeah, let’s use logos as our hypothetical for this.

Ok, so – you make logos & you know that there’s a TON of people who need logo design made, so you take out an ad for logo design & you pick your keywords that you think people are going to be searching on. BOOM! You get instant results from your ad campaign & you can see that your ad is getting ALL. KINDS. OF. CLICKS. (OMGALLTHECLICKS!) and you do your little happy dance & wait for your orders or leads to start rolling in.

(Crickets)

No big deal, you tell yourself, people are probably comparison shopping & I know that I’ll win in the comparisons because my stuff is WAY better than that one outfit in the northwest of the country who totally copied it. It’s probably just taking them a little time, I’ll check back in a week & see where my numbers are.

(Crickets)

WHATTHEHECKISGOINGONANDWHEREAREMYORDERS?!

So you’ve waited & been notified a couple times that you’ve hit your automatic billing cutoff & you’ve spent invested a gajillion Ameros in your ad but you’ve seen no results. Zero. Zip. Nada. Ok, time to head over to your metrics, where you can see more in-depth data on your ad’s performance. What’s this? You see that there’s a search term section & you can actually see the term that caused your ad to display. THIS. IS. AWESOME! So you start digging into the data to see what you can learn.

Right you are! But you spent a gajillion Ameros on your ad, shouldn’t you have seen some results? Not really, because the ad was shown to ALL. THE. WRONG. PEOPLE. Since the time that I started writing this post, there have been H-U-N-D-R-E-D-S of searches in the US alone on “free logo” (link). Look at that list a little closer & you’ll see that a big chunk of it is a search for free fonts, which is kind of funny when we’re talking about good logo design – pro tip: free fonts don’t make for awesome logos.

What am I supposed to do about this?

Ready? Aim!

No, that’s it, really, just aim to deliver your ads to your “target market” for the best possible results? Who’s your target market? Your ideal customer. If you sell cakes online, you don’t want to deliver your ads to shadetree mechanics on DIY sites. Depending on the platform you’re using to serve up your ads, you may be able to define “negative keywords” which will keep your ad out of searches that don’t work for your model. Like “free logo” for example.

Man, hypotheticals are fun!

Ok … I think I’m getting it but I sell widgets to wandering wizards in the Shire. How do I reach them?

Well, I suppose the easy way would be demographically. Let’s say that you get your ad graphics all set up & have your budget & landing page all set up, now you need to tell your ad platform who to deliver the ad to. Most wandering wizards in the Shire are centuries-old men who don’t live there, they’re just passing through. So you can set the demographic on your ad to target males, at least 200 years old, in the Shire but don’t live there. That should be a pretty good start!

But what about the crabby old men trees that pass through there?

Hmm, yeah, I see your point. Maybe try refining your audience a tad more by defining interests. Exclude the occupation of photosynthesis & include the interest in saving the world – NOW you should be set!

Whatever you do & whatever your business needs are, a little careful planning at the outset can go a loooong way toward getting you where you need to be – especially with ads. So be sure that you’re reaching the right target audience!

Autumn Lane Paperie Provides Ad Campaign Services

Why not chat with us to see if your business ad needs are a good match for our ninja skills? We’d be happy to look at what you’ve got going on &, if we’re a good match, provide a quote for your ad campaign with us as your ad managers. Contact us & let’s see where this goes!

The devil's in the details.

Just like any pro will tell you, anyone can do what they do – with years of practice & some special tools. We’ve got both! Without getting too detailed, what sets us apart from the inexperienced includes:

Years of experience

Special (and very expensive) tools that allow us to see data that would be otherwise inaccessible (yep, you guessed it! this is used in our campaigns)

Instant understanding of what needs to happen when we examine website traffic numbers

Ads - are they really worth it?

(Spoiler alert - We think so.)

This will surely come as no surprise to anyone but one thing that we’ve been quietly doing for years is navigating the advertising gauntlet for Autumn Lane Paperie & a few, select clients. We’ve had some amazing successes & some learning experiences but most of the time, it’s been base hit after base hit, which is really what you want with a boutique business.

But don’t you want buckets & buckets of money raining down on you??

Well, that sounds like what you’d like to have but stop & think about it for a minute. Let’s say that your company is selling handmade items, made prior to order, & you forget to set an inventory limit or there’s a glitch in the ordering system that grossly oversells your item. You’ve made a LOT more in gross revenue … but you’ve got to decide now whether to risk the ire of your customers for needing to wait longer for the item (because it still needs to be made – again & again) or you need to disappoint them by refunding their order. And what business owner likes to part with an order? Trust me, it’s much better to grow in a way that is easily managed, rather than have 58,909,881,710 orders all come in at once – that sandy beach will lose its appeal after about 3 weeks anyway.

I thought we were talking about ads …

We are, we are! Let me get back to the topic – we’ve seen that without intelligent advertising, boutique companies rely most heavily on luck, at first, then word of mouth to get them where they need to go, keep the lights on, etc. But there’s a problem with that model too – unless you’re in a solid niche & you’re tied in with the crowd that knows everybody in your hometown, it’s not likely to be enough. I come from a pretty small town & can tell you a lot about how a person is likely to behave based on their family name (it’s a really small town) but one thing that they’ve not been able to resist, just like everyone else in today’s world, is the increasing personal isolation that’s affecting everyone nowadays, which sounds dumb but it really isn’t. We can do everything on our laptops & phones, nowadays. We’re more connected than we’ve ever been but we’re also far more isolated because of it – people either stay home more (called cocooning) or they’re always on their phones, ignoring everything & everyone around them. It’s downright unsocial but that’s how it is.

Umm …

Right, I’m getting there. So – how does the average mom & pop business make it work with ads? (See? I finally made it to my point.)

They can take out an ad in a local newspaper but unless their clientele is an older generation in a really, really, small, isolated town, what are the odds that the ad will have the desired effect? Most folks don’t even get the paper anymore. Personally, I prefer the comics, maybe a bit of crossword, and I’m good – ya with me?

Obviously, there are exceptions to this, when we’re discussing, for instance, local businesses who need to drive engagement or advertise to a very specific locale, rather than globally, then Google Ads (formerly AdWords) probably can help your business. But competing globally? Umm … that’s pricey.

What about social media?

Social media advertising can really help level the playing field a bit for the little guy. Take the Facebook, for an example – for as little as $5 per day, a small business can set up an ad campaign. Think about that. That’s the price of a cup of coffee every day but this is investing in your business rather than filling your office mates with envy over your grande pumpkin spice chai latte mochaccino frappe latte la de da.

So how do you advertise without making yourself look … silly?

Very carefully. It takes a lot of time, trial & error & insight into how the machine works to make it work properly for your specific needs. There are tons of resources available to read online at sites like Alexa, Moz, Yoast, etc. & even more in the way of opinions & working philosophies when it comes to ad campaigns, which provides a starting point for any ad campaign.

Hey … those are all SEO websites.

Ah, you caught that. Well, strange as it may seem, SEO & online ads are connected very closely, making it so that to learn about one, you kind of need to learn about the other. You’ve got time for that, right? If you want to increase your business’ visibility & online traffic, my bet is that you’ll make time for it.

Or hire an expert.

Autumn Lane Paperie Provides Ad Campaign Services

Why not chat with us to see if your business ad needs are a good match for our ninja skills? We’d be happy to look at what you’ve got going on &, if we’re a good match, provide a quote for your ad campaign with us as your ad managers. Contact us & let’s see where this goes!

The devil's in the details.

Just like any pro will tell you, anyone can do what they do – with years of practice & some special tools. We’ve got both! Without getting too detailed, what sets us apart from the inexperienced includes:

Years of experience

Special (and very expensive) tools that allow us to see data that would be otherwise inaccessible (yep, you guessed it! this is used in our campaigns)

Instant understanding of what needs to happen when we examine website traffic numbers